This is a repository for all cool scientific discussion and fascination. Scientific facts, theories, and overall cool scientific stuff that you'd like to share with others. Stuff that makes you smile and wonder at the amazing shit going on around us, that most people don't notice.

If you can’t take a bloody nose, go home and crawl under your bed.
It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous,
with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross…
but it’s not for the timid.
-Q

In my book, Death from the Skies!, I don’t spend much time discussing magnetars. Although terrifying — able to generate truly mind-numbing outbursts which I’ll describe in a moment — they are simply too rare and too far away to be much of a threat.

Yeah, well, I might’ve been wrong. A little wrong, I mean; there’s no reason to panic. Life on Earth won’t be snuffed out by some rogue magnetar blasting away our atmosphere or anything like that. But one of my main premises for feeling completely safe has been eroded a bit, and to be fair I should talk about it.

Magnetars are neutron stars, superdense balls of tightly packed neutrons left over from the collapsed core of a massive star that’s gone supernova. Neutron stars have about the mass of the Sun but are only a few kilometers across, making them fantastically dense and giving them surface gravities that can be billions of times the force you feel standing on the Earth. They also can possess magnetic fields literally trillions of times stronger than the Earth’s. And in some cases, young neutron stars can be even more powerful: their field strength might be a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) times the Earth’s! These beasts, called magnetars, probably lose that field strength rapidly, decaying in only a few thousand years. That makes them rare on a galactic scale.

Still, several are known to exist. And they can have a nasty, nasty temper.

See, the magnetic field is coupled to the crust of the neutron star. The crust is extremely rigid and under vast pressure from the gravity of the star. If the crust cracks — a starquake, if you will — the energy released makes the strongest earthquake ever recorded on our planet look like a friendly pat on the back. I once calculated the strength of such a starquake, and it would register as magnitude 32 on the Richter scale. This ultraviolent blast shakes the magnetic field of the star, which in turn reacts by slamming around subatomic particles… the bottom line is that such an event can trigger a phenomenal release of X-ray energy from the star. And by "phenomenal" I mean "pants-wetting terrifying".

In December 2004, the magnetar SGR 1806-20 underwent such a starquake. In one-tenth of a second the subsequent blast released something like 2 times 1046 ergs of energy — equal to about 50 trillion times the Sun’s output during that same period.

Holy crap.

This star sits about 50,000 light years from the Earth: literally halfway across the Milky Way galaxy from us. Yet, even from that forbidding distance, this titanic event was able to physically affect the Earth. It compressed our magnetic field and partially ionized our atmosphere, causing it to puff up measurably.

Mind you, it was 500 quadrillion kilometers (300 quadrillion miles) from us at the time.

So you can see why these things are a bit unnerving. But really, this one is so far away! Sure, it can hurt us, but at that distance really all it can do is what it did; we don’t expect it can have a bigger event, so we’re safe enough. Moreover, these objects are so bright in X-rays that we think we’ve found all the really big bruisers in the Galaxy. If one were closer to us, there’s no way to hide it. We’d see it.

Yeah, about that…

Astronomers have announced they found a new magnetar, named SGR 0501+4516, and it’s only 15,000 light years away. It turns out to be dark most of the time, emitting very little energy, which is how it escaped detection. But it had an outburst last year that lasted four months, allowing scientists time detect it and to get a good long look at it. This event was far less violent than the one from SGR 1806 in 2004, but still nothing to sneeze at.

Is it capable of an SGR 1806-like event? Probably not — that was an extraordinary event — and I certainly hope not! At 1/3 the distance, the effects on Earth would be nine times as strong. That could damage satellites and possibly even cause some effects on Earth itself — probably nothing that would be too big a deal, but still. Yikes.

The thing is, in Death from the Skies!, I said we’re safe from these things because they’re far away, and it’s not possible to hide any closer to us. Yet here is this one, three times closer than SGR 1806. It makes me wonder if there are any closer still. If one were, say, 5000 light years away and had a blast like the one in 2004, the effects would be 100 times larger! There could be serious satellite damage, and possibly even blackouts on Earth due to electric currents induced in our power grid.

Let me be clear: I seriously doubt there’s anything that close to us. This new one at 15,000 light years is something of a fluke, and it’s entirely possible it’s not capable of the same kind of explosive event as its more distant cousin. The odds of one being even closer are pretty small, so I’m not too concerned about it. If I were, believe me, I’d let you know!

The point here is that we have to be careful when we talk in absolutes, and it’s always good to question assumptions. If there’s one thing we know for sure about the Universe, it’s that it’s capable of some pretty good surprises, and not all of them need be the happy fun kind. We’re almost certainly safe from this particular threat… but maybe a little kick in the complacency isn’t always such a bad thing.

You know it's rather amazing to me... that a small beetle, who's entire life consists of rolling around a little ball of turd, still has the capacity to use the light from the band of the milky way in the night sky for navigation. Most people's knowledge of astral positions consists of trying to find the Big Dipper(Which isn't even the correct name of the constellation). And we consider ourselves the smartest life forms by a huge margin. Yet here's these little shit beetles doing things that the vast majority of humans cannot currently do. But it's not for lack of ability. So why is it that we've stopped looking up and stopped noticing the amazing infinite universe swirling around us, only to focus more and more attention downward to our own silly insignificant creations?

AKA.. Why visiting extraterrestrial life wouldn't consider us anything more than ants. To an outside observer with no knowledge of Earth, we're barely 1% "Smarter" than chimps. And considering the way we view/treat chimps as lower life forms despite only a 1% difference, that's some scary shit....

You know it's rather amazing to me... that a small beetle, who's entire life consists of rolling around a little ball of turd, still has the capacity to use the light from the band of the milky way in the night sky for navigation. Most people's knowledge of astral positions consists of trying to find the Big Dipper(Which isn't even the correct name of the constellation). And we consider ourselves the smartest life forms by a huge margin. Yet here's these little shit beetles doing things that the vast majority of humans cannot currently do. But it's not for lack of ability. So why is it that we've stopped looking up and stopped noticing the amazing infinite universe swirling around us, only to focus more and more attention downward to our own silly insignificant creations?

Anyone want to explain to me the significance of discovering quadruple helix DNA?

Quote:

Balasubramanian and his colleagues believe their discovery may help make it possible to stop the "runaway cell proliferation at the root of cancer," according to Phys.org. The idea would be to target quadruplexes with "synthetic molecules that trap and contain these DNA structures -- preventing cells from replicating their DNA and consequently blocking cell division," according to Phys.org.

However, the scientists say that much about four-stranded DNA remains a mystery.

“There is a lot we don’t know yet. One thought is that these quadruplex structures might be a bit of a nuisance during DNA replication -- like knots or tangles that form," Balasubramanian said of the discovery, according to a statement released by the university. “Did they evolve for a function? It’s a philosophical question as to whether they are there by design or not -- but they exist and nature has to deal with them. Maybe by targeting them we are contributing to the disruption they cause.”

[...]

“This research further highlights the potential for exploiting these unusual DNA structures to beat cancer -- the next part of this pipeline is to figure out how to target them in tumor cells,” Dr. Julie Sharp, senior science information manager at Cancer Research UK, said in a statement posted on the university website. “It’s been sixty years since its structure was solved but work like this shows us that the story of DNA continues to twist and turn.”

This one coming from our brainy finned mammal friends from the ocean. This wild dolphin approached a group of divers off Kona, Hawaii who were out on a manta ray watching expedition. This dolphin approaches the divers, who see that it has fishing line in its mouth, and wrapped around it's fins. The hook from the line is embedded in its fin, and the fishing line is restricting the dolphin's movement. This dolphin ignores instinctual fear, and allows the divers to remove the hook and fishing line. Almost like he was asking for help...

There have been many reports of dolphins helping people in the ocean, usually by running off sharks and such. So it's nice to see an example of a dolphin actually trusting a human for help. I think these animals are infinitely smarter than what we give them credit for...